We chatter. We discuss a play, or a moment, or a goal scored or not scored. Occasionally, someone will suggest asking a ridiculous question to break the tension. And then he enters the room.

He enters from a door at the back of the room and most of us orient ourselves in such a way as to see him the minute he enters, as if this first glimpse up close might tell us what his mood might be in. It’s not like he kicks the door in when he’s angry, or comes skipping in when he’s well-pleased. But we want that first look anyway.

He steps up onto the dias at the front of the room and, as we settle and click on recorders and phones we hold aloft, he unscrews the cap on his water bottle and takes a drink.

“First question.”

Someone asks something and he considers his answer, placing the cap back on the bottle and leaning in toward the microphone.

This is when we find out what mood he’s in.

***

I forget how lucky I am to get the chance to see behind the curtain. I wrote a few words, met a few people, and now I get this. I get to meet the coach of the opposing team before the game, although briefly, in the elevator. After the game, I’ll listen to a player talk lovingly about his kids. I see the stadium staff doing all the things that make gameday work.

But, somehow, I’ve lost my words. I’m trying to get them back, trying to recapture the balance that allowed me the opportunity to peek behind the curtain. And I’m grateful to all of you who’ve stuck with me as I’ve been quiet.

The note on the box was printed in neat block letters. Her name. Her address. No postage was visible and the box was tied closed with twine.

She looked up and down the street as if she thought whoever had left the box might still be visible, but there was no one. Two birds on the phone line, a cat on the porch across the street, no other living things that she could see.

The box was an awkward size and she banged her hand on the door jamb as she wrestled the box through the heavy screen door and into the house.

The girl used her car key to cut the twine when she found the knot too difficult to untie. Roughly nine billion styrofoam packing peanuts poured out onto the floor and with them, a black violin case.

When news broke Monday about the corporate sponsor-driven tifo effort in Seattle, it seemed the perfect opportunity to poke fun of Portland’s northerly neighbors.

But I couldn’t do it.

Offering up an opportunity to a corporate sponsor to create something that should be entirely supporter driven isn’t really a laughing matter. It’s an indication that Seattle’s front office is willfully ignorant of the culture that pays its bills.

But, Kristen, supporters are involved in the creation of this thing!

Sure. Sure they are.

I exchanged a few emails with the Alliance Council’s president, Stephanie Steiner, about how this happened. She, along with more than a few other Sounders supporters, is not happy.

According to Steiner, Delta set up a focus group to learn about the awareness of their brand support of Sounders FC, and how they could build it. Suggestions from the focus group included several community events, pop up clinics, and appearances by players, but what Delta and the Sounders front office have announced is “far beyond” what the group discussed.

“They FOed all over it,” Steiner says. “The whole idea that came from the focus group was a huge community event with art as the vehicle and Delta as ‘oh, by the way.’ Instead they spun it to huge art with Delta as the vehicle and the community became the ‘oh, by the way.’”

Emerald City Supporters tifo for a November 2013 playoff game welcomed the Timbers and Timbers Army to what was expected to be their “nightmare.” Photo: Brandon Farris

Corporate sponsored tifo isn’t new. People will come out of the woodwork to tell you all about big money pieces done in leagues around the world. And a quick Google search will bring up an EASports Clint Dempsey tifo done in Seattle in the not-too-distant past. But this is different.

Fans were asked what they wanted. They offered opinions and ideas. Those ideas were twisted into something that opens Pandora’s Box: an essential part of supporters culture being hijacked by a corporate sponsor and a team’s front office under the guise of being a fan-led effort.

Emerald City Supporter and Alliance Council member Jerry Neil was part of the focus group. “I told them what makes tifo, tifo. I also stressed that it wasn’t a good idea, but they went with it anyway,” Neil says. “They said if they were going to go with that idea they would inquire further, but they didn’t do that.”

Other supporters groups within MLS have been approached with ideas for corporate sponsored tifo and, as far as I can see, those approaches have been rebuked. While it may occasionally be offered up as a form of protest, the purpose and motivation for tifo should not be for commercial enterprise. I saw someone on Twitter refer to this as “advertifo.”

The spirit of tifo is this: art created by supporters, folks who volunteer their time and resources, in order to honor the players on the field. And that’s how it should stay.

Aside from all of this, Seattle’s front office has forgotten the First Rule of Tifo: don’t talk about it.

A Facebook post caught my eye Friday and before I knew it, I was digging through websites trying to find out what I could about an amateur team out of California that calls itself La Maquina.

La Maquina doesn’t have a website. I stumbled across a Facebook page early in my search, but didn’t make note of it and now can’t find it again. On the contacts page of the UPSL site, the president goes by a single name.

The editor for the site I’m going to write this piece for gave me an email address for the assistant coach, but several emails have gone unanswered.

The UPSL site has minimal information. And when I say minimal, what I mean to say is that there isn’t even a current schedule. By going to some of the individual team sites, I suppose someone more industrious than I could cobble together a schedule of sorts, but there’s really no way to know if it’s complete.

And about a minute and a half ago, word came down that one of the teams in the first round has been disqualified. They were due to play in less than 24 hours.

I love the Open Cup so much. I do not have the words to express how much I love it.

The Open Cup, for all of its unpredictability and last minute disqualifications and the sometimes non-existent streams of early round games, is made of magic.

Seventeen MLS teams will enter in the fourth round. And there’s the possibility that a team of landscapers, accountants and college kids will face off against Robbie Keane or Kaka. My first USOC match saw a team of amateurs go toe to toe with a professional side whose striker was the all-time leading scorer of the Scottish Premier League. But we don’t talk about that. At least not more than once a year.

USOC is impossible and improbable and sometimes, if you’re very lucky, you get to see the (former) captain of the USMNT take a referee’s notebook and tear it up, earning himself a red card and putting his team on its way to finishing with just seven players against their closest rival.

For MLS players, it’s maybe just another few games tacked onto an already packed schedule, but for these lower league and amateur teams, it’s the chance to chase a dream.

This is where my frustration reaches a boiling point. The Open Cup is the longest-running tournament in US soccer having been played for over a century (the first trophy was donated by distiller Thomas Dewar) but until the later rounds, there’s little promotion, and very little media coverage. It deserves better.

The guys who are taking off work, using vacation days to live out a dream deserve better.

In August of 1994, I packed a bag with far too many t-shirts, my mom drove me to the airport, and I got on a plane to Minneapolis.

I had no idea what I was getting into.

I thought I knew. I really, really didn’t.

In the months that followed, I traveled thousands of miles, mostly on tiny county roads in the upper midwest, with a team of like-minded individuals. We traveled six days a week, circling Lake Michigan, playing concerts in churches, schools, nursing homes, one youth detention center, and, if I remember correctly, an unscheduled bit outside of a grocery store in Rockford, Ill.

We slept in host homes, on church pews, at summer camps. We ate more red-sauced pastas, pizza, and ham sandwiches than I care to remember.

The organization that gave us the opportunity to do this ridiculous thing, Youth Encounter, is closing up shop after 51 years of ministry.

Fifty-one years. All fifty states. Thirty-two countries. Twenty-five hundred teamers. Thousands of other volunteers. An estimated eight million people reached by the message.

Most people in my world now have no idea this was something I was a part of. My faith is personal to me. I don’t shout it from the rooftops. If the subject of faith or Christianity or theology comes up, I might add to the conversation, but I have yet to toss my Bible onto the table and proclaim,”Let’s talk about the Lord!”

That’s the funny part. That wasn’t even my style then. I literally have no idea what I was doing there. To this day, I’m convinced it was a clerical error and I got a letter of call instead of some other, more worthy candidate.

Regardless, my time with Youth Encounter was over long ago and now the organization is facing it’s last days.

Times have changed. The mission of the organization when I was a part of it was “To strengthen the Church through the faith of its youth.”

It was a time before the megachurches, before attendance at “contemporary” services was often higher than traditional church services. It was before every church had a full band set-up next to the altar.

It was before Twitter and Facebook and even *gasp* Myspace.

Dave Anderson, the founder of what was then Lutheran Youth Encounter, spoke at the event that was held tonight to commemorate the end of YE. “I can’t believe,” he said,”this ministry has gone on so long that we need decaf. We’re no longer youth for Christ. We’re old people for God.”

Youth Encounter changed a lot over the years. Starting with one team that traveled in Scandinavia, growing to send teams (usually of 5-8 people) to every corner of the globe. At its height, it sent out as many as fourteen teams in a year. My team, Captive Free – West Great Lakes, was one of (I think) ten on the road that year with six regional stateside teams and four internationals.

How did it work?

I applied. I took a personality test that was about a bajillion yes or no questions. Things like “I like tall women: yes or no.” Well, uh, I don’t *dislike* tall women. Most people also did an audition tape, an acapella version of “Beautiful Savior.” I somehow managed to never do one (see? clerical error).

Most everyone had an in-person interview. My first was with Greg Birgy. Greg, bless him, is the spitting image of that picture of white, blonde Jesus that hangs in every church rec hall in North America. He’s a good guy, a dear friend after all these years. But, after that interview and the extensive application process, the letter I received was a letter of deferral.

I was devastated. I was a year out of high school and didn’t really have a plan. I was writing, taking classes, treading water.

I waited over a year before trying again.

This time, my interview was with Robin Bragge. Robin was the director of international teams and had the quickest, sharpest mind of anyone I’ve ever known. I was terrified of her.

We sat across from each other in a McDonald’s in San Jose and she grilled me until she caught me. I’d said something about “when I go on team” and she stopped me. “When? Not if?”

I didn’t know what to say.

When, not if.

If, not when.

I’m a big fan of the concept of free will. Things in our lives aren’t predestined. We make our own decisions and we reap the rewards or we suffer the consequences. But sometimes, I think maybe we’re pushed toward paths that lead us to the people we’re supposed to meet.

Robin and Greg took a chance (or checked the wrong box – I’ve never asked) and sent me a letter of call in the spring of 1994.

I talked to Troy Loken in July and he told me my teammate’s names, which I wrote down wrong, and I got on a plane in August to go to a city I’d never seen and get in a van with six strangers to tour the midwest.

We made it through training, an intensive several weeks that included a trip out into the wilds of South Dakota for a week-long stay at Lee Valley Ranch to refine our musical program (“Hey, you wanna play bass? Here. Hold this.”) and to better develop our interpersonal relationships. If you’re going to live out of a van for a year with six other people, you have to figure out how to get along right quick.

I say we made it through training, but we didn’t really. We lost our first team member at a rest area on the way back from Lee Valley. So, that was weird.

With a week of training left before our commissioning and send-off, we were already in recovery mode. Rework the program, do it as quicky as possible. There was a lot of yelling.

But we did it. And we packed everything into our van and trailer (the mechanic said we’d be okay with the van if we didn’t pull a trailer, and the guy who fixed the trailer said it’d be fine if we didn’t put too much weight into it), and we did a training program in Osage, Iowa, then set off into Wisconsin.

That first night on the road, I stayed with a family of dairy farmers. I was in a completely different world.

I’d seen some of the international teams before, teams sent into Africa or Papau New Guinea, into places so poor that to refuse a meal would be an incredible insult as the entire village would have pooled their resources in order to offer it to you. I did not expect to find similar experiences in the United States.

People housed us, fed us, gave us whatever we needed. When our van broke down outside of Joliet, Ill., one of our host families put up the money to get it fixed. Young couple, couple of kids, mom was getting ready to go back to school. They were struggling to make ends meet, but they saw a need and decided to fulfill it. I still look back at that and wonder if we should have accepted their kindness but I also know that to have refused it would have been refusing their part in a ministry that meant a great deal to them.

This is what we looked like when we were much younger and stupider. Lucas Kaserman, Alison Hesford Krinke, Tanner Shirley, Tamara Eisele Tadic, and me with a lot more hair. Sometime in 1995.

I could tell dozens of stories like this, as could any of the 2,500 hundred people like me to spent that year (or two, or three) on the road. As much as we were out in the world to do ministry, we were also ministered to.

Before tonight’s celebration, there was a gathering of folks at a pizza place nearby because, apparently, none of us ate enough pizza when we were on the road. I went, not knowing if I’d know anyone there.

As it turns out, I didn’t. I recognized a few people, but I didn’t really know them. I sat quietly by myself (I know this is shocking to all of you) but an older gentleman named Larry asked if he could sit with me. Turns out he was an event tech from Chicago (likely worked the events my team did when we were there). “I had to come,” he told me. “I’ve had enough things that I didn’t get closure for lately. I need to see this through.”

When I landed in Minneapolis in 1994, it was Lowell Michelson who met me at the airport. And when I got to the church tonight, it was Lowell who greeted me there.

The church was filled with faces and voices from my past, musicians and vocalists, ministers and teachers, hundreds of people whose lives were changed because someone said,”Hey, come do this thing.”

It’s a hard thing to say goodbye to and I do so with mixed feelings. While YE was a driving force in my life from roughly 1988 – 1998, the tone of the ministry changed and some people who’d given so much of themselves to the organization were alienated by it.

I am thankful for the ministry it was. I’m thankful for the lives it not only changed but saved. I’m thankful for the experience of it, from high school kid locked out of a hotel room in 1988 to leadership training in 1990 to sound tech in 1994 to the life I’ve lived beyond the time when my mailing address was 2500 39th Ave NE, Minneapolis MN, 55421.

First Lutheran Church in NE Minneapolis is where my year on the road began. This is a terrible picture. Apologies to First Lutheran for this and likely many other things. Actually, apologies to literally every Lutheran Church in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and the city of St. Louis.

Those last few hours at work on Friday are the longest hours of my life. Each minute is ten minutes. Each hour is four hours. This is how it’s been since the final whistle in Dallas, but by the end of the week, with flights just hours away and bags not yet packed, the tension of waiting has reached a crescendo.

My alarm goes off at 2:50 a.m. Saturday, December 5. And again at 2:55, 3:00, 3:05.

By 4 a.m., I’m in line at the Alaska counter at Portland International Airport and by the time I reach the security line, the airport is awash in green and gold: scarves, hoodies, Timbers kits in green, red, white. Never has PDX been so festive.

There are roughly a dozen of us on the 5 a.m. flight to Seattle, where we’ll catch a connecting flight to Detroit. None of us has ever been so excited to head north to the Emerald City.

We talk about how lucky we are to be making this trip, how we never thought we’d be so excited to be going to Ohio in December, and once we’re on the plane, we apologize to non-green-clad passengers who are not nearly as awake or as excitable as we are. The woman seated to my right is having none of it.

I’d been apprehensive about going through Seattle on the way to the Final. Superstition, maybe, or perhaps memories of unfortunate results at Centurylink Field. But there’s a certain beauty to be seen when flying over the home of your closest and most heated rival on your way to a cup final, especially when their field is lit with green lights and the streetlights surrounding it cast a golden glow.

We’re met by even more Timbers faithful in the Seattle terminal. There will be at least two dozen of us on the flight to Detroit, but there are many, many more waiting for flights to other locales. Everyone is aiming for the same final destination: Columbus, Ohio.

Columbus, Ohio. In December. It’s a thing we’ll repeat to each other in disbelief over and over. “Remember that time when we all got really excited to go to Ohio? In December?!”

Slowly, over the course of several days, this feeling has been gathering steam: we are, one or two people at a time, moving Portland to Columbus.

One of my travelling companions has been tasked with making sure I’m okay on the plane. He thinks it’s because I’m not good at flying but, in reality, the nerves of going to a cup final to see my hometown team play for hardware far outweigh whatever travel anxiety I might have. Nonetheless, when he moves and a stranger is seated across the aisle from me, the stranger is given a lecture. “You might have to hold her hand if she gets nervous,” he’s told. The stranger agrees.

Before we take off, I look back at the passengers seated behind me. There are people I know, or people in Timbers or Timbers Army gear, in nearly every row. There’s never been an away day quite like this.

Nine hundred tickets were sold through the 107ist, the organization behind the Timbers Army, but an estimated 2,500 people made the trip to Columbus from across the United States and from as many as seven different countries. As a point of comparison, the Timbers Army’s biggest organized away day was to Seattle in October of 2012 when the supporters group sent seventeen buses and 1,500 people north on Interstate 5 for a match against the Sounders.

An hour into the flight, I look over to see the stranger across the aisle flip a page in his magazine and land on a double page spread about the Hurst Edition Trans Am, a retooled Chevrolet Camaro outfitted to resemble Bandit’s car from Smokey and the Bandit. Smokey and the Bandit, from which we get the Jerry Reed classic “Eastbound and Down.”

It takes me a minute for it to register. I lean over and ask him if I can take a picture of his magazine and then smile to myself for the next several hours. There’s no way that’s a real sign of anything, I try to tell myself. But I know.

When we touch down in Detroit, we still have a three-hour drive ahead of us. Twitter tells us our friends and fellow supporters have spread out across Columbus to make it their own.

A meet-up is set at Columbus’ Three Legged Mare, an Irish-themed sports bar in the arena district. What started as a Facebook invitation from one of the Timbers Army’s regional subgroups has turned into a gathering of several hundred people who spill out onto Ludlow Street and across to Gordon Biersch where, by the time I arrive, they’ve run out of Jameson.

I’m separated from the friend I’ve arrived with almost as soon as we’re out of our taxi, but it doesn’t matter. Everyone here is family.

Pushing through the door into the Mare, the first pair of eyes I see are those of Timber Jim, who cuts through the crowd to greet me. He’s in his element, surrounded by Timbers fans. Someone starts a chant and the bar takes it up. Glasses are raised, hugs are offered and accepted. It’s like a family reunion for people who are not related by blood, but by sport.

Phone buzzing in my pocket, I make my way across the street to Gordon Biersch to catch up with the Scot and the Irishman and, miraculously, the bar finds one last hidden bottle of Jameson. We toast the season, we speak of vanquished foes, we plan for game day.

***

Sunday morning dawns. It’s like any other game day, only more so. I’m a bundle of frayed, raw nerves. This is for all the marbles.

I take a taxi out to Mapfre Stadium. “Where do you want me to drop you?” the driver asks.

“Just look for a bunch of people wearing green.”

There are probably 500 people gathered for the Timbers Army tailgate, but the number will double before it’s time for the group to march in. We don’t tailgate in Portland; there just isn’t space for it. We gather in bars and restaurants around Providence Park, but this feels so much different. There’s something communal about it. There’s a line set up for barbecue, and tables set out with what I can only guess is several hundred pounds of sub sandwiches.

I’ve missed the wedding, but not the giant pink fluffy unicorn, who is seated in a place of honor on a sofa (why do we have a sofa in this parking lot?) near the PA. There’s beer from Widmer that I assume we’ve brought across the country, Smokey and the Bandit-style.

I run into Shawn Levy and, for approximately the ninth time today, I cry. “You know that phrase, ‘I can’t even’?” he asks. “I am the walking embodiment of that phrase. I can’t even.”

The sentiment is repeated with nearly every person I talk to. No one can believe we’re here, in a parking lot in Columbus, Ohio, in December, with so many of our friends. We know how lucky we are. We know how the stars had to align to get us all here. We know the work put in behind the scenes.

We’re still stunned the ball hit both posts.

Someone hands me a sandwich and I realize I don’t remember the last time I ate. We’re all nerves and nervous energy. Thankfully, come of us are caretakers and it’s one of these that makes sure I have a sandwich. I’m still thinking about the guy with the magazine on the plane.

Crossing lines

Then comes the part that’s hardest for me. I cross a lot of lines. I’m a supporter first, a writer second, but on game days, the line between the two is sometimes blurred beyond recognition.

I hug everyone within arm’s reach four more times and set off by myself to see if they’ll let me into the stadium.

Over the last year, I’ve been credentialed in four different MLS stadiums as well as Seattle’s NWSL stadium and Starfire Sports Complex in Tukwila, Wash., for a US Open Cup match. Each time, when it’s my turn for someone to check me off their list, I hold my breath because surely this will be the time when I’m found out, when they realize I have absolutely no business being in many of the places I find myself.

But they check my name off the list, and I’m given a credential and a fuzzy blue blanket embossed with the MLS Cup logo along with some sketchy directions about how to get to a temporary press box that’s been set up for overflow media.

This is my favorite part of any game day, this quiet time before ticketed spectators are in the park, when it’s just media and staff. There’s a quiet buzz of people going about their jobs, performing the thousand tasks necessary before the game can be played.

I find where I’m supposed to be, in the back row of a temporary press box directly over the Nordecke, the Columbus supporters section, and directly across the stadium from where the Timbers Army will be.
The stadium is starting to come alive. The flag and drum crews for the Timbers Army trickle into the visiting supporters section and I make my way toward them, unable to stay away. Everyone has a stunned, almost shell-shocked look, as though, despite our pre-game banter and our Twitter bravado, we’re still surprised that we’re here, that this is real, that this game is going to happen.

Banners are hung, some for some of our brothers and sisters no longer with us. This whole thing has been an emotional whirlwind and a common theme has been the collective desire to honor our history and to carry the fallen with us to the end.

Fans from both sides begin to fill the stadium and the Timbers Army section fills within minutes. Flags, drums, capos, songs: so long as there is a traveling Timbers Army, the Timbers will never play a true away game.

I’m an absolute mess by the time I make it back to the press box.

The anthems are sung and the Timbers Army tifo goes up in two panels: one a semi truck emblazoned with the Cupbound logo the TA has carried through the playoffs, the second a line from the Jerry Reed song. “We’re gonna do what they say can’t be done.” A Smokey and the Bandit tifo.

There are Ohio guys to my right and to my left, Prost’s founder, Steve Clare. To his credit, Steve has done his best to keep the Portland team on track in the week leading up to this game. “Enjoy it,” he tells me as the game begins. “I know your heart’s over there with the supporters, and I know you want to cover this in the best way possible, but take a few minutes and don’t be afraid to watch part of the game as a fan-“

And this is when I miss the Valeri goal.

Yup. I missed the Valeri goal. Instead, I see the reaction of the corner of the Nordecke to my left, then the dancing of the Timbers Army across the stadium, then the celebration of the Timbers on the field.

Twenty-seven seconds.

Steve is still talking when the second Timbers goal comes in the seventh minute. “It might be okay to chant a little under your breath,” he says.”

I’m crying, head in my hands. This can’t be happening. How is this even possible?

The rest of the game is a blur. There’s a Columbus goal, there’s a missed handball, the whistle blows. I’m standing, typing, trying to capture the moment, but I’m not really seeing. Steve, hand on my arm, says simply, “Watch this. You’re going to want to remember it.”

I see the players on the field – my players – celebrating. I see the stage being set for them to lift the Cup. I see them Tetris on the field as the Timbers Army Tetris’s in the stands.

And I see Columbus’ Kei Kamara sitting on the field. He’s done everything he can to get the win for his team including scoring the Crew’s only goal. He’ll be quoted later as saying he stayed on the field because he wanted to see what it was like to lift that trophy but now, it seems he’s overcome by the loss. Timbers midfielder Will Johnson takes a moment to give him a pat on the back before rejoining the winning side for the trophy presentation.

I watch as the Cup is lifted. I watch the reaction of my friends in the Timbers Army and, though I know I’m where I belong, I’d much rather be at the other end of the stadium with them.

I wrote this three months ago as news of the Morgan-to-Orlando trade broke, but I didn’t post it. Today, we got the announcement that the Thorns will host Orlando in Portland’s home opener in April and all the crazy came out of the woodwork again. Yesterday was much more fun. The eye-rolling I’ve done today has given me *such* a headache.

I sometimes have unpopular opinions. Sometimes I utter them out loud, in front of people, occasionally in public places. Sometimes I post words to the internet. Often, I just keep them to myself. I’m wondering if I should keep whatever follows here to myself. Probably.

My most recent foray into unpopular opinions comes on the heels of the Thorns-Pride-Reign mega-trade that ended with USWNT star Alex Morgan leaving the Thorns for the sunnier climes of Florida. And, as I apparently have not articulated this enough times, I wish her the best.

Sadly, because I have not thrown myself upon the ground to worship her, I’ve been accused of not being a fan, of not respecting her, of flat-out being an embarrassment to Portland.

Okay. Let’s go over this so it’s all out in the open.

I was surprised in 2013 when she was allocated to the Thorns. It made little sense to me. She had been playing as a member of the Sounders Women but some sort of weird ownership blip with NWSL and the SW owner and US Soccer meant she would be allocated in the new league and here we are. Everyone I know expected she would stay in Seattle and Pinoe would come to Portland. In hindsight, I’m glad it was Morgan that came here.

Seriously. Read that last sentence again. Here, I’ll put it in bold for you: I’m glad it was Morgan who came here.

She did well here in the inaugural season of NWSL, despite mid-season injury. She scored goals, she tallied assists, she fought back from injury because that’s who she is: a competitor. A fierce competitor.

But, as fierce as she was on the field, we as supporters had little chance to connect with her as a person. Let’s remember how she was used in the marketing of virtually every other team. “Alex Morgan’s Portland Thorns.” She became less of a person and more of a selling point, inaccessible in a city where supporters deeply value their connections to their clubs and players. People would show up en masse at away matches to get her autograph and then complain when she couldn’t get to everyone.

My issue, despite what many will read into these words, is not with her. It’s with the marketing of the league and it’s continued reliance on national team members to sell tickets. You know what will sell tickets in the long run? A good product. You know what else helps? A beer garden, but that’s another post. A third thing that will sell tickets? A thriving supporters culture.

By the time we reached 2014, Morgan was injured again. She struggled with fitness and pushed herself to make a return to the field. Please do not tell me I do not respect that. After her first game back in 2014, I sat in the presser afterward and saw the tears in her eyes as she told us how disappointed she was with her performance, how she’d wanted to be able to do more but just wasn’t quite there yet. Again: fierce competitor, amazing drive to win. I have nothing but respect for that.

It just didn’t come together for her in Portland. Back-to-back injuries, absences for national team duty and – dare I say this? – a general disconnect from Thorns supporters made for an unfortunate situation. Being told she wouldn’t travel to Chicago for a match early this season because of the turf there turned me a bit more. Thierry Henry she ain’t.

So, yes, I respect her as an athlete, but I wanted to love her as a Thorn. I don’t think I’m alone in this.

Instead, my imagination was captured by Mana Shim who showed up at an open tryout and won a spot on the team though hard work and determination. It was captured by Vero Boquete who made me cry more than once when she spoke about how her only desire was to win games because the Portland fans deserved it. It was captured by Sinead Farrelly and Kat Williamson who wore Riveters bandanas in their official team mug shots. It was captured by Kaylyn Kyle who was the first of the World Cup players to return to Portland and, though she was given the opportunity to rest after Canada’s WC campaign ended, insisted on playing for the Thorns almost immediately upon her return.

I think I said it earlier today somewhere on Twitter: I feel sorry for Alex. My wish for her is that she somehow finds a way to connect with supporters in Orlando in ways she was unable to here. I think we saw momentary glimpses of who she can be, but they often were overshadowed by her duty to country over club.